Retention of a feature

Translations

- | - | -

Article

Phenomenon by which a language within a group or a variety or dialect of a standard language maintains a category that is otherwise lost in the other languages of the group or in the main standard language.

While retention may be due to the isolation of the language or variety, its peripheral collocation or other sociolinguistic factors that induce archaism, in some cases retention of a feature or category may be induced by contact with a language that has a similar feature or category.

Example

The case seems to be quite uncommon in literature even for modern contact scenarios, not because it is qualitatively unlikely to occur, but because the sum of circumstances required to trigger it are more uncommon than those to lead to contact induced innovation.

A proposed case (Giusfredi and Pisaniello 2021) in the Ancient Near Eastern world is represented by the retention of nominal inflection and the lack of development of the enclitic "article" in Sam'al Aramaic, possibly due to the influence of Luwian, which had inflected nominal morphology and lacked an overt definiteness-assigning article. All other varieties of Aramaic, includind Old Aramaic, lost nominal inflection and developed the "article" (also known as emphatic state of the noun).

References

Giusfredi, F. and Pisaniello, V. 2021. The population, the language and the history of Yadiya/Sam'al. In the Proceedings of the 2012 Ascona conference "Beyond all boundaries".